FAQ
Our Managing Director Dr. Henry Köhler is responsible for your DED inquiries – please feel free to get in touch directly via
Mobil: +49 (0) 160 1254955
h.koehler@ded-services.com
Our head office is also available for you to contact:
Phone: +49 (0) 5351 55 90-0 , Monday – Thursday 7 to 16 h and Friday 7 to 13 h
info@ded-services.com
In order to be able to quickly provide information as to whether the dimensions of the component to be machined (L x W x H) “fit” into our system technology, the accessibility of the area to be machined and an indication of the existing and/or planned material combinations is likely to be processable, CAD data of the component, ideally in *.prt (SIEMENS NX), *,st(e)p or other common formats, together with information on the material and, if applicable, heat treatment condition, are very helpful for us. On this basis, we can then enter into an in-depth discussion about feasibility and possible solutions!
Laser processes are generally characterized by very good controllability of the heat input. The actual heat input is limited very locally to the beam geometry on the workpiece and realizes very steep temperature gradients as well as small heat-affected zones on workpiece surfaces and in the workpiece volume. Lasers emitting with continuous power can also be modulated very quickly in their output power, so that adaptive processes, e.g. for controlling a melt pool temperature and/or size, can be realized very well. An optimally adjusted laser powder build-up welding process produces hardly any spatter, has a powder efficiency of well over 90%, does not produce any burn-in or chemical impurities in the build-up welding due to excessive mixing and achieves perfect coating results from a build-up height of just a few tenths of a millimetre. By using powder filler materials, a much greater variety of materials is available than is currently offered by wire filler materials.
As a rule, the DED process addresses structures with wall thicknesses significantly >= 2 mm, so that beam/melt pool diameters above 1.5 mm are usually used. For a good compromise between deposition rate and spatial resolution, a beam diameter of around 3 mm has proven to be extremely effective. The use of hybrid technology, in which additive manufacturing and mechanical post-processing and finishing can be carried out in a single clamping operation, allows structures to be realized at corresponding lower limits depending on the material. All configurations are available from DED Services GmbH as options for processing customer tasks!
In the DED process, shielding gas is fed into the processing zone via the processing head, eliminating the need for a chamber-based setup, which is typical for powder bed 3D printing. On the one hand, significantly larger components and volumes can be processed, and on the other hand, process times for flooding of a build-chamber are eliminated. As the filler material is not pre-placed in a large volume and then melted, but is instead placed by means of a processing head where it is actually needed, it is possible to work effectively with a very small amount of a powder material and to process different materials next to each other, even building up material gradients!